Guild Wars 2 Archives - Page 30 of 32 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Other Worlds

September 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night marked my return to the Monday night raid thing in Final Fantasy XIV, that I had not been able to attend the last few weeks for one reason or another. I know most of my blog coverage lately has been about Legion, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for lots of other games. The intention was to pull together last night and do a lot of raidy bits, but I kinda ruined that. I’ve written about the struggles to get Luna integrated with our household and the other two cats. Things are still not going well, and I am not sure if they ever will at this point. She simply hates other cats, and I cannot seem to get her from charging the other cats when she sees them. This is a sort of behavior I have never seen in any of the other cats we have had throughout the years. It has gotten so bad that the only real way we can stop her is by dousing her with a spray bottle. Which seems to do NOTHING for the long term effect and only distracts her for the moment… because seconds later she is charging once again. So the only other option is to keep her shut up in my wife’s office… which is a somewhat shitty life. Now we are on that hard precipice of trying to decide what is best for her and what is best for our other two cats. We have some options, but one of them is of course to return her to the organization we adopted her from. I’ve never really felt as much as a failure as I do right now because we have tried so many things… including the extremely expensive pheromone night light things. In any case… Tam really likes to just queue the group instead of doing a ready check, and there was a period of time where I was away from the screen dealing with cats. The end result of too many of these premature queues unfortunately is that I locked the entire group out, at which point we dissolved instead of waiting thirty minutes for it to clear. We did however at least get a single kill in before that happened, and knocked out some needed content for one of the guildies.

The other game I have been occasionally poking my head into is Guild Wars 2. I have a really fraught relationship with this game, but it has been something that I have patched up multiple times and attempted to play. I say attempted, because no matter how many times I try there is just something that never quite clicks with me. I made it to about 65 on my own recognizance… and then got boosted due to the daily login system the rest of the way to 80. While I have tried a bunch of different classes… it feels like the one I still like the most is Warrior in spite of how lousy melee generally feels in this game. During a recent sale I managed to pick up Heart of Thorns for $18… and I figured it was well worth giving it a try for that price. With that came with a boost to 80, but I have not figured out what class I actually want to use it on. During Pax South 2015 when they announced the expansion… I thought Revenant was going to be the class for me. However the boost allows you a “try before you buy” sort of functionality… and in practice the class just doesn’t feel like anything I am interested in. It is this strange amalgam between WoW Shaman, Deathknight, and Rogue and in a way that just doesn’t exactly feel like something I want to play. During the boost it hands you a hammer and a pair of swords, but I am wondering if maybe one of the other weapon combos feels better since as warrior I only really like greatsword and hammer. In any case I popped in last night for a bit and started actually trying to move my original story forward… I stalled out around 60 and just never tried to pick it back up. Maybe the story will hook me into the game in a way that the gameplay never actually did.

Pax Prime Hopes

August 28, 2015 by Belghast

The Big Show

It feels like we live in this world where there is always another big games show around the corner. I remember when quite literally all that existed was the Consumer Electronics show, at least for the United States. Now we have dozens of shows sprinkled throughout the year, all of which vying for exclusive announcements. As a result companies have to trickle information out so that everyone that attends one of the shows feels like they are getting to see something unique or special. This weekend of course is Pax Prime, and I had hoped this year I would be attending. The truth is however that Pax Prime will likely never be in the cards, as the husband of a teacher… August is a HORRIBLE time for me to be travelling. During this month my wife is in full on panic mode as she gets adjusted to another school year, and while for a bit I was bummed at not being able to attend, I am realizing it was ultimately for the best. As a result I will be a loyal yearly Pax South attendee and pretty much brush aside the thoughts of doing the Pax Prime thing. Instead at some point I will just go out to Seattle to meet my friends that seem to be pooling there, instead of trying to make one big combo trip. Having been to a Pax, I have to say in truth the folks at home have a much better view of what is going on there through the live stream. As a result I am looking forward to spending much of the weekend watching as much as I can. Which gets to the point of this mornings post. I thought I would talk a bit about the various things I am hoping to get out of Pax Prime 2015.

Final Fantasy XIV

The thing that I want this weekend… is a release date for 3.1. I know we are getting close, but I want to know a firm release date so I know just how long I am going to have to wait. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is going through a bit of a content lull much like it did after the release of A Realm Reborn. Quite frankly at this point I am tired of running Neverreap… since that seems to be the dungeon I get most often. Two dungeons in a roulette rotation simply is not enough, and I am honestly a bit concerned with the news that 3.1 is only going to add two more as well. My hope is that they create a four dungeon expert roulette instead of moving Neverreap and Fractal to Hard Roulette and making expert just be the two new dungeons. The other piece I am really looking forward to is the next 24 player dungeon the Void Ark, aka the creepy airship you sometimes seem flying around in the Sea of Clouds. The game needs a shot in the arm of content, because folks are starting to slow down… myself included. More so than this… I would like to see some future vision type stuff for 3.2 and beyond. In the past we have usually had this list of things that Yoshi P had promised for “future” patches and we are a bit low on that right now.

Wildstar

Similar to FFXIV… and honestly a lot of the things I am going to talk about this morning…. I just want a date for when the Free to Play conversion will happen. They keep putting new patches on the test server and it is starting to feel like maybe they are close, but what I need from them is a date. I am enjoying Wildstar so much more than I have at any point in the past, and a lot of the changes that are coming in with the free to play conversion are going to be generally good for the game as well. Past the free to play conversion… I would like to see some information about what their long range plans are. I don’t even know if they have a presence at Pax Prime this weekend, but even if folks don’t they tend to time announcements around major shows as well.

Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Since the expansion announcement at Pax South, I have had a strange connection with this title. Traditionally speaking I do not really enjoy Guild Wars 2 that much. That said I have to say the revenant looks more interesting than any of the previous classes. I fully expect that I will be picking this title up when it launches if for no reason other than the fact that it is once again “buy to play” and I have gotten my original purchase out of the game. This has been the year of announcements completely unfettered by timelines, and it is starting to get frustrating. Once again we have a big title looming on the horizon with zero date announced for when we will be expecting to play it. I am expecting that this one is going to be a lot like Heavensward was, where they announce the launch date and it is only a few months away. My hope is that Pax Prime finally is going to be the show where they talk about this at. Give your fans some firm dates.

Blizzard Titles

I am honestly not expecting anything new to come out of this conference from Blizzard. They did their big reveal of the World of Warcraft expansion at Gamescom, and I fully expect that with Blizzcon coming up in November that they will be holding everything else closely waiting on their big show to reveal it. I fully expect that they might announce a new Overwatch champion at Pax Prime, and potentially some more Heroes of the Storm champions or maps. What I am really wanting from them is an announcement for when Overwatch testing will begin and a beta key delivered in my mailbox. Everytime I launch the patcher and see that Overwatch button at the bottom of it… I get a little sad in side. I really want to play this game, and I sincerely doubt I will be doing so anytime soon. Over the last few weeks I have come to the realization that I still very much love Blizzard games… it is apparently only World of Warcraft that I am on tentative terms with. I would love beyond love them to announce something for Diablo 3… like maybe another expansion? They have already hinted that they might be doing a Warcraft RTS after they wrap up with Starcraft II… so that alone has me pretty pumped.

No Man’s Sky

I am so irrationally hopeful about this title, even though I keep telling myself that there is no way it can deliver on everything it has been promising. I love exploring new areas, and I love killing strange and interesting creatures. No Man’s Sky promises to give me a procedural generated world where I can do this… over and over again throughout the galaxy. On top of that the graphics are kinda cool as well with their hyper saturated version of reality. Again… all I really want from Hello Games is a release date. I have a feeling that we will have an announcement for some sort of beta testing to begin soon. Supposedly Amazon UK is already taking pre-orders so hopefully we will get a date this weekend.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

At this point I just want more information on this title. We saw a short trailer from E3 and I have been wanting more information since. Once again I have no clue if there will be a presence at Pax Prime, but I am hoping! I want to know more about the nuts and bolts of how this title is actually going to work. I want to know if there is going to be a multiplayer aspect, or if this is just one big single player skyrim-esc sandbox. I also want to know more about the world that surrounds the game.

Devilian

With my recent foray back into Diablo 3, it has made me extremely interested in Devilian a Diablo like Korean game that Trion is going to be publishing. I know Trion is going to have a good presence at the show so I am hoping we find out when the beta process is going to begin. I ended up with a key from Gamescom and I keep checking my Glyph launcher expecting it to show up in the list of games that are playable at some point soon. While on the topic of Trion Games, it is too soon to hope for a Rift expansion but I would still like to get more information about where that game is heading, and some more detail on the future plans for ArcheAge. The folks at Trion Worlds are awesome so I am always interested in what they have to say.

Goodbye Names

June 23, 2015 by Belghast

Preorder Announcements

This is a topic I have mulled over for several days, and am just finally getting around to posting. I have had a fairly rocky relationship with Guild Wars 2 that started with me bowing out of their alpha program and ended with me finally finding my groove a few months back and getting my first character to 80. The game is enjoyable but honestly it is not the kind of enjoyable I had hoped it would be. Which was all the more surprising when I found myself oddly riveted to the presentation at Pax South in January. I thought maybe it was the energy of the crowd, but whatever it was I found myself actually looking forward to the Heart of Thorns expansion. I have always liked Dark Knight type characters, and the Revenant looked very much like a character in my wheel house. So as we moved into E3 I was looking forward to seeing more information about the game, namely about the release date, pricing information, and what the guild hall system would end up being like. In all cases I pretty much got what I was hoping for, but upon seeing the pricing something struck in my craw.

As I looked through the options available on the website… the Standard, Deluxe and Ultimate versions all included the previous game. I kept looking for the versions of the game for players who bought the game at launch and had no need for the base game. Problem is there wasn’t one, and there was not planned on being one. Ultimately what I was looking for was a $10 or so price break on purchasing the game, to acknowledge the fact that I have owned their game forever now. The funny thing is… had they not mentioned anything about the core version… it probably would not have annoyed me at all. I guess I am not alone in my frustration because yesterday Arena Net announced that they would be giving Veteran Players an extra character slot to make up for the fact that they have owned the game so long. This is a nice gesture, but for me… who already has two empty slots because I don’t care enough to roll more characters… it still rings a little hollow. For the time being I won’t be pre-ordering, and honestly not even sure if I will be playing… just depends on what else I happen to be doing at the time this game launches. If nothing else I am sure it will go on sale at some point and I will be able to pick it up then.

Goodbye Names

I guess this morning is going to be a mixed bag of commentary from me, because another thing that mildly frustrated me yesterday was the announcement that World of Warcraft would be releasing all character names that had not logged in since December 7th 2010. While 2010 is a very long time ago… I also happen to have a bunch of characters. In fact I have a grand total of four different World of Warcraft accounts, and my primary and active account has managed to hit the maximum number of fifty characters. I have characters spread out on dozens of servers that I have no clue when the last time I played on them. So last night when I saw this news I had resigned myself to spending two hours logging every character on and off to make sure I reset the timer. Apparently the plan going forward is to do this release of character names each time Blizzard releases a World of Warcraft expansion. Personally I think that simply having an active subscription should be enough of a toll to pay to keep your names from getting the axe… but it seems that is not the case.

So while I was extremely frustrated when I first read that… my frustration faded as I came to the sad realization that there are very few characters in World of Warcraft that I really care about anymore. I have only had one foot in that game for the bulk of this expansion, and last night I realized I would far rather spend my hour making progress in Heavensward than logging characters in and out to make sure they did not get squashed. Today should be a big day for World of Warcraft with the 6.2 patch content being released… but I am finding myself not excited about it at all. I have too much new and shiny going on in another game, and while at some point I will log in and get my Naval missions going, for the foreseeable future I am not planning on raiding. That was really the last thing keeping me connected to that world was my raiding, and when it started to feel stale and forced… I felt it was time to start quietly fading into the background. So I guess at this point I am come around full circle, if someone really wants to be one of my old character names… then awesome go be it, because I won’t be using the name.

In Other News

Last night was a pretty great night… once I was able to get through the login boss mind you. I have some serious fears as to what tonight is going to hold in that department, unless Square Enix has something up their sleeves to make that problem magically go away today. For most of the night I was held up in the main storyline trying to get to level 55, so immediately upon logging in I started trying to arrange some dungeons. However other people in the guild needed stuff, so we arranged a very quick Shiva Hard trial for one of the guildies. It is amazing how “easy” this fight is, but then again my scale is greatly skewed from having just finished the Shiva Extreme battle last week. From there we ran another round of Sohm Al, which again dropped some nifty stuff for our alts. I think I managed to add one more piece of the cosmetic set to my inventory, which is awesome… because I absolutely want to complete the full set. Ashgar mentioned earlier in the evening that he needed the first primal encounter, and we also had several others nearing that point… so we hung out for a bit letting them get caught up before taking on the primal and defeating it rather brutally. That fight with a full guild group is a very different experience than with random players.

From there… we were bad people in that we decided to try and plant the seeds of raid addiction in a friend of ours. Lately Shiana has been leveling in game, and he was our raid leader back during Vanilla WoW and has raided off and on since then. I am not sure if it was Tam or myself that suggested it last night, but in either case we were both in collusion to get him into raiding. As a result we started last night on Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5, and while we had two new players to the fight… we managed to get through it without much issue. It was helped massively by the fact that both of the players that we grabbed were seasoned raiders in other games. From there we moved into Second Coil of Bahamut aka Turn 9 and we struggled a bit. Firstly with Ashgar gone by this point, I had to take over and learn the main tank role on the fight. In my experience each time you change roles on a fight, it is like starting back from square one and relearning everything. Then we had Shiana for whom this was just his second FF raid experience… but all in all we managed to make what felt like a bit of progress. At the very least I think I could fill in for Ash if I needed to, once I got over the whole Ravensbeak straight up murdering me bit. It was a great night of gaming… and tonight I am hoping to get a run of the third dungeon in… that I just unlocked.

Playing Catch Up

February 17, 2015 by Belghast

Battle Bards Episode 45 – Rock On!

This segment is going to be a little bit odd, because at the time of me writing it the episode has not officially gone live. However I only post once daily, and as such I really would like to get a plug out there for the show. In saying this, the links I am about to post will not go live until 9 am so I will be embargoing my post this morning which is an odd experience for me. On February 7th I had the privilege of sitting in as a guest host on the Battle Bards podcast with the illustrious Syp and Syl. To make things even kookier, they told me that I needed to pick a topic. I went back and forth on a few topics and finally landed upon rock themes in MMO games. Traditionally MMOs seem to have the same auditory palate of instruments and themes. Every now and then however there is a soundtrack that abandons the traditional and brings in some rock guitar. Over the course of the show we focused on these tracks, and I believe it was Syp that finally gave the show its title of “Rock On!”.

I had an absolute blast recording the show, and would be more than willing to step in again if they ever had need of me. Now onwards with the show information.

Episode 45 show notes

Intro (featuring “Blue Turns to Grey” from Tabula Rasa, “Battle on the Big Bridge Reborn” from FFXIV, and “Prologue” from Castlevania SOTN)
“Titan Battle Theme” from FFXIV
“Alonewolf” from Rusty Hearts
“Toko” from Granado Espada
“Character Select/Map Load” from Heroes of the Storm
“New Conglomerate Main Theme” from PlanetSide 2
“Malicia’s Finale” from DDO
“Lucid Dreaming” from Aion
What track did we like the best?
Mail from Akiranon
Outro

Listen to episode 45 now!

Email the Battle Bards!
Special thanks to Tesh for the Battle Bards logo!
Battle Bards is part of The Gaming and Entertainment Network of podcasts

Giving Levels Away

Last night I managed to hit level 71 in Guild Wars 2 and absolutely thought I would never actually get there. In truth I would not have gotten there were it not for the fact that the game seems to be giving away levels every time I turn around. At some point they added the Tome of Knowledge into the game, and double clicking them item grants you one instant level. I am not sure if I am exceptionally lucky, but I seem to be pulling these left and right out of various bags and containers. Last night from my daily login reward chest I pulled two of them for example. I think my meteoric rise in levels is really two fold. First they keep giving me levels, but secondly it seems like everything is quite simply worth a lot more experience. I did a level and a half over the last few days dinking around and completing a level 5 starter zone. I still have about half of the objectives in that zone to go, so I am enjoying the fact that it doesn’t actually seem to matter what I am out in the world doing… just that I am doing something.

At this point I can honestly picture getting up a few more characters, because right now this game seems to be the ideal winding down practice for me. We finished our Final Fantasy XIV raid around 9:30 pm, and I played Guild Wars 2 for another thirty minutes or so after that. At which point I felt relaxed and ready to go to sleep, which has always been a problem for me after any raid experience. When you have been doing exciting things, you have this surplus supply of adrenaline flowing through you, and for me at least I need something much more relaxing to work through all of that. While Guild Wars 2 may never be destined to be my primary game, I am really appreciating its worth in the role it is playing. I am curious to see what life at 80 is going to be like, but I have a feeling that ultimately I will just end up switching to an alt so I can continue the slow paced progression. If nothing else I think it would be pretty awesome to 100% the map.

Playing Catch Up

Monday night is traditionally our more serious raiding night in Final Fantasy XIV with Saturday being a sort of anything goes experience. However since last night we had a number of players hung up on key steps to the main story and other things… we opted to do a grand “catch up” night. We started the evening by knocking out the Battle of Big Bridge for Neph, which is always an extremely fun experience. That is one of those fights that I happily do every single time anyone needs it because getting to play with Gilgamesh is always a treat. From there we knocked out the Dhrome Chimera fight because that was the step Neph happened to be hung up on for her Relic. I remember the first time we did this fight, it took the full raid timer, because quite honestly back then it was a massive challenge. However since then a method of pulling the Chimera out of the cave has become popular and this makes the fight immensely easier. Also the fact that I am insanely over geared helps as well. In any case we got the fight completed quickly and Neph moved on to the next step in her relic chain.

The bulk of the evening was spent working on the Chrysalis trial. This is the road block placed in the path of completing the 2.5 main story arc addition. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the fight, namely because I don’t want to provide any spoilers. There are a couple of places in the fight there where things shift drastically, and you have to begin dealing with a new mechanic. In truth the fight felt like a bit of a remix of some of the raid encounters. There were elements of several fights from the Crystal Tower series especially. I think it took us about five tries to get through the encounter, but I have to say the whole experience was extremely fun. That is one of the best things about Final Fantasy XIV is that their boss encounters are extremely solid. After defeating it, and each of us making it through the cut scene we had around twenty minutes left to do something. As a result we grabbed Solaria and opted to help her get through the Leviathan primal encounter. It was a night of lots of objectives being checked off, and a night of many fun battles.

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